Kuan Eng was one of Singapore's hottest creative directors, collecting Nightmare Before Christmas figurines and award lions and pencils when tragedy struck, altering his life forever.     

"I lost my younger brother to a sudden illness, and that shook me up," he tells us.

Kuan Eng quit work and went to travel around the world with a suitcase full of questions about life and his role in it.

He met strangers and spent time alone, travelling across the US without any plan. When he came back, he knew he didn't want to do advertising anymore, but he didn't know what else he could do.

He signed up for a meditation course in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had to observe a vow of silence during his stay, which forced him to look inside. Two days in, all the emotion he'd stifled came spilling out.

We're sitting at a food court near his apartment, talking about all this over some local chow. He picks up the juice he's drinking and, using a straw, gives it a good stir, causing the contents to swirl around in his glass. He explains, "This is us in our everyday lives. There's way too much going on, too many stimulants leading us in different directions." He lets the liquid in the glass settle and adds, "And this to me is meditation."

Kuan Eng attended another meditation course, he sold off all the things he'd earlier thought he couldn't do without. And he made a decision to help people, in whatever way he could.

He took up a course in counselling. And started speaking to prison inmates and their families. Over time, he started teaching them art. He did the same with the elderly. When he shows us some of the paintings his students have done, with no art background whatsoever, we're genuinely blown away. Not only are the drawings and photographs stunning, they also reflect a new found peace in the person that drew or clicked them.

Buoyed on by the difference he was making, Kuan Eng sought out more that he could give back to the community. His next idea came from an unlikely source, his nephew. Kuan Eng was asked to teach the boy the Hokkien dialect and started posting simple illustrations of words on his Facebook page for him to guess the meanings of.

The posts became rather popular and were featured by local bloggers and radio stations. Friends started urging him to release a book. Kuan Eng released five, one each for Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese. The books enjoyed great commercial success. But the social impact it had on people is the bit that Kuan Eng gets most excited about.

"People from all over started writing in to me," he tells us, his eyes moistening, "One English gentleman wrote saying he's using my book to help his wife with dementia."

Kuan Eng invites us back to his HDB flat. It's a minimalist wonderland that fits his personality perfectly. He cuts up a tropical fruit that he insists we must try. It's amazing. He shows us a new book he's just released, with a hundred dialect idioms and slangs he picked up by eavesdropping on conversations in coffee shops and local neighbourhoods.

"I was hoping to find about twenty. In the first week alone, I found three-hundred," he exclaims.

A full two and a half hours later, we're ready to say our goodbyes. It feels like we've been at a meditation workshop ourselves. And we walk out of his apartment feeling a lot lighter than we walked in.